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The hardware tech wave is surging and investors are quickly paddling out to cash in. Bolt, a Boston based hardware centric seed fund, is among them.

Bolt typically invests $50,000-$100,000 and aims to write larger cheques in the future. But the real value for many first-time or new hardware entrepreneurs is the expertise that the Bolt team brings as a seed fund. The team counts highly experienced mechanical and electrical engineers, manufacturing experts, product and industrial designers as part of their secret sauce to help bring products to market. Some of the team has worked on very commercially successful products, including Pebble watch and the Makerbot 3D printer.

Unlike software start-ups, hardware startups require high tech facilities to bring an idea to life. So beyond the usual office space for minds to meet, Bolt offers machinery and metalworking, electronics, rapid prototyping – a playground for hardware geeks.

Co-Founder and Managing Director, Ben Einstein, believes investors are becoming more comfortable with hardware startups. This sentiment is no doubt driven by the spate of large billion dollar exits of companies like Nest and Oculus Rift. However, Einstein sees the hardware space as being too new for limited partners to become super interested. Over the last six months, Bolt has seen very strong deal flow, a sign of the hardware renaissance.

So far, most of the Bolt teams are still too new to have put products on shelves. One of the closest to shipping a product is Petnet.io, a device that helps combat pet obesity by controlling feeding portions and managing nutrition. Staying true to the ‘internet of everything’ phenomenon, it comes with an app to control pet feeding from your laptop, smartphone or tablet.

“My job is not to predict the future, but instead find the people that will.” Says Einstein. But when it comes to backing a type of industry, Einstein is attracted to what he calls “unsexy enterprise problems that people don’t think of, and ugly, nasty hardware problems that people don’t have technology for already” – think industries such as landfill, agriculture, weather and shipping.

In fact, Einstein detests ‘dumb smart products’ or those that try to create an Internet connected device for the sake of connecting it to the Internet. Instead, he believes entrepreneurs should be trying to make dumb products smart, like BigBelly Solar; a public trashcan that notifies crews when the can is full and needs to be emptied, rather than having crews inspect all cans without knowing if they are full or not.

Picking the right product and team to invest into is complicated. Development cycles are much longer than pure software plays. Consumer hardware products can have huge upside but also carry very real downside risk. To minimize this risk, Bolt prefers entrepreneurs who have successfully built a business before and are more familiar with software. Bolt brings the hardware expertise.